


shadows almost killed your light

by communitys



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: anyway i digress have fun, basically gale sits in the woods and has thoughts, this is short but i am pleased with the way i wrote him, yes i'm a gale hawthorne apologist in the year 2020 keep it moving, you ever project onto a character so hard you question your hogwarts house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:26:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25948057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/communitys/pseuds/communitys
Summary: Tonight, he is free from that. Tonight he will lie in the forest and try to sleep for once. It is a welcome change. He has fought for so long and a soft ending is the only proper way to conclude the story. (But, as all happy endings are, Gale Hawthorne’s rest rings hollow and brief. The next morning he will wake up and be forced to remember again.)[or, Gale Hawthorne didn't recover like everyone thought he would]
Comments: 5
Kudos: 10





	shadows almost killed your light

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! It's Arden, and I'm delighted to welcome you to my latest fic for The Hunger Games. Funny story - I actually wrote for this fandom years ago, from the perspective of Cashmere from Catching Fire. I have since deleted the story (it was an affront to the English language) but the little I remember of it cements my belief that this is much better. I've written here from the perspective of Gale Hawthorne, coming years after the war in Mockingjay. It is completely canon-compliant.
> 
> A few things to note before we get started. Gale is probably my favourite character in THG (tied with Katniss, who is often slightly above him), but I am still pro Everlark and will have to be repeatedly yelled at to write anything for Everthorne. Secondly (and this is more important) Gale's opinions on psychiatry and therapy are not my own. They are meant to be in line with his character, and I intend to cast absolutely no judgement on those who seek help for traumatic experiences. It is something I would encourage. Please do not read this fic if detrimental discussion of psychiatry / therapy is triggering for you. 
> 
> To those who do decide to read this, I hope you enjoy it. Maybe write a review if you're up for it?
> 
> TW: Negative discussion of psychiatry / therapy.

If he’s a monster, he wishes Katniss would tell him. It would make things easier. When they want him to be a military captain, he agrees. When they tell him to manage people in desk jobs, he agrees. He is so tired of fighting that they could put him right back in District Twelve the way it was before and he’d just crumble into the ground. Tonight is another one at the bank where District Two meets the woods, his feet unsteady on the mud in a way they haven’t been since he was twelve. It should follow that the night is not a particularly good one for him.

Gale Hawthorne is twenty-two years old and already he feels himself fading back into war. There is always something new to be fighting for, another chasm torn open in the narrow ideal of justice. There is no space for a boy who is always fighting in a world at peace. He picks up a stone on the riverbank and tosses it into the water; just so he can have something to do with his hands. It splashes near his feet and sinks to the bottom at relative speed. That looks like it could be a metaphor for something, but he’s skipped too many ‘mandatory’ classes to understand what it means. 

He feels so incredibly useless. He knows how to set a snare and shoot a squirrel clean through the eye; he has only recently learned to read and write. (It was never of much use in the Seam, and he supposes the Capitol didn’t want to expand the degree of communication between citizens. Funny how it’s been years and he still feels resentment burning in his gut.) Gale knows more than anyone else just how terrible things can get. But he is built for winning wars, not for preventing them, and so he sits uselessly as captain of a military no one needs. His soldiers spend days filling out paperwork while he tries to keep a hold on himself in his office. 

Good days, good things to fight for. At least people are safer. There’s legislature being passed to prevent future Hunger Games, but Gale knows how easily laws can be overturned. It all seems ridiculously flimsy to him, everything they’re doing to fix things. It can all be so easily undone. In frustration, he tears a patch of grass out by its roots and doesn’t bother cleaning the dirt from under his nails. It’s only recently that he’s learned what it feels like not to have coal dust envelope you like a second skin. 

Recently, recently, and he moved to District Two years ago. They’re trying to change the perception of districts, renaming them with arbitrary syllables, but it will always be District Two to him. Something will pop abruptly and he will hear a mountain exploding. A Capitol-assigned psychiatrist (the word is foreign, he had to roll it around in his mouth a few times before it made any sort of sense) has told him the war will always be with him. Gale hates that: they won. They’ve won already. He tried to beat him - he did in the ways that matter - but they wouldn’t go quietly. That would be too much of a kindness. The scars torn from war burrowed under his skin and stayed in his bloodstream; he can no more escape memory than turn himself inside out. 

It doesn’t matter. He knows what a psychiatrist is. They think he’s crazy. People always think Gale is crazy, even when he’s perfectly sane. He often feels as though he’s got a very specific picture of the world that he doesn’t know how to explain to anyone else. (He never had to explain it to Katniss, she just knew, she picked up on it like a second language. But he might’ve killed Prim and he knows she can’t forgive him for the suspicion. That’s fine, she’s entitled to that. He’s also entitled to missing her, but it’s irrelevant.)

The psychiatrist asks him lots of questions. His sessions are mandated by the same people who controlled him in Thirteen, and that’s enough to make him mumble answers and dodge attending. Gale doesn’t see the point in talking to anyone if they can’t fix him. He would like to be fixed, or at least he thinks he would, but he doesn’t think it can be accomplished through talking. War hero is a good enough title to avoid being questioned for his actions. No one has confronted him yet.

“I’d definitely tell them off if they did,” Gale says, even though only the trees and river are around to hear him. He’s never shaken the feeling of being able to say whatever he wants to in the woods. “Isn’t winning a war enough? Now I have to sit in a room for hours and talk about what they did to me? I’d rather stay up all nights until I don’t have dreams than tell someone about it.” 

He winces, at that, at the acknowledgement that he hasn’t made it out completely unscarred. He has known that for a while, which doesn’t mean he likes admitting it. Gale has spent his entire life fighting and raging against the Capitol and they got a piece of him in the end. Now the thought makes him curl his head into his knees like a small child; hoping that the monsters cannot get him if he can’t see them. Of course he knows better now. Of course he still clings to a childhood he was never allowed to have. 

Predictable outcomes for traumatizing situations. It’s something the psychiatrist would say, something one of the well-meaning people would mutter when they come to check on him. He doesn’t need checking on, he’s not a child. He is very tired of people worrying about him and he is glad that they have mostly stopped. Now he has a home larger than two of the ones from his childhood and no one to live in it with him. (He’s grown accustomed to holding everyone at arms reach. He still doesn’t know who to trust.) Cressida drops by his house occasionally and asks for tea, which is really an excuse for her to double check that he has food in his house. 

Gale always has food in his house. He knows what it is like to be hungry. The feeling has not come back to him since he got his post-war job, but the ghosts of it linger under his skin and force him to the market. Hunting is still highly regulated. It will probably inspire another protest and a surface change of rules that doesn’t fix anything. At this point, he feels accustomed to the natural order of things. 

He lets the grass fall out of his hand and back onto the forest floor. Even in the dim thrum of moonlight, he can see a green tinge on his fingers and palms. If he could look at more of himself, he would notice a distinctive tiredness in his frame; something that projects itself through poor posture and so many hours staring at the night sky blackness fades into dawn. His back hurts more recently, which is a pretty common ailment for coal miners. Gale thinks he might need to talk to someone about it, but decides it’s not worth the trouble. He doesn’t want to give anyone more reasons to worry about him. They already think he isn’t ‘recovering at an appropriate rate,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. 

He wants to scream at the people who say that, wants to shake them by the shoulders and say _i fought for a world where we can complain about things like this! I did my part already, I’m still suffering for it, let me handle that and go fix everything that broke!_ He’s so tired. He really is. He feels like things haven't changed enough and it haunts him because it isn’t right. Person after person died in that damned war and things didn’t change enough. 

There’s been nothing of note in the past three years. The world whistles around him and he tries not to focus on it for fear of eruption. It’s only in periphery that he can acknowledge the world hasn’t been fixed yet: if he looks at their government head on he will realize all the wars of his youth amounted to slightly better monsters. Keeping the watch on injustice is too much for any one person to bear. It is an absolute miracle he has not gone insane yet. (Add that to the list of sicknesses, mental or physical. Add that to the reasons they think he’s crazy. Just do something with the new information because Gale Hawthorne can’t bear to lie around useless.)

“I’m not crazy,” he snaps, but he doesn’t know what he’s proving with it. The wind rustles around his shoulders and stirs up the trees. How hard will it have to roar to make him feel less alone? There is no satisfactory answer, so he just lies down in the grass and tries to forget everything. His own sharp words cloud over him, but he clears his mind and they disappear. Gale is always the first person to forget himself, which is probably a product of something else. He hasn’t figured out what it is yet, but that’s not for lack of trying.

Forgetting things is difficult. Alcohol has been suggested to him, but he’d rather not end up like Haymitch. Besides, it seems a frivolous expense. The sounds of animals and rushing water are a better vice than morphine will ever be. At least this is not hurting anybody. (Psychiatry calls this a healthy coping mechanism, Gale calls it keeping his head screwed on his shoulders. They are both right.)

Rain came the other day, so the ground stains his clothing with damp marks. It is cool and comforting, a familiar set of tones to slip into after days where he feels himself fading. Gale is best when he is in the woods. No one expects anything of him there, no one needs him in the woods. Katniss did, for a bit, but she learns fast. He is probably flattering himself by thinking she ever needed him at all, but it is something like a balm to put on the wound of her absence. Oh, she doesn’t matter here in the woods on the outskirts of District Two. That was why he moved. 

There is so little tying him to home here. He was tired and terrified and constantly hungry or angry in Twelve, but at least it felt like home. At least he worked next to his father’s ashes and he had everyone he loved next to him. He was primed for pain by forces bigger than he was before he was born… so how is it appropriate for him to miss a home they forced him to hate? Maybe his love for Twelve is his last act of defiance against Snow. (He wishes Katniss had let him shoot the man. Coin was hardly better, but if she wasn’t going to finish off Snow he wishes she had let him do it.)

What is really left for him at home? His family is alive, and better off without him. Rory, Vick, Posy, and his mother. Every day he remembers they are still alive and just fine without him. It provides the kind of courage necessary to keep moving forward, to get out of bed and remember what he’s supposed to be doing with himself. Forgetting that is easy, which strikes Gale as a cruel sort of irony. 

Tonight, he is free from that. Tonight he will lie in the forest and try to sleep for once. It is a welcome change. He has fought for so long and a soft ending is the only proper way to conclude the story. (But, as all happy endings are, Gale Hawthorne’s rest rings hollow and brief. The next morning he will wake up and be forced to remember again.)


End file.
